Modern Genre Theory

David Duff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317879312
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Since Aristotle, genre has been one of the fundamental concepts of literary theory, and much of the world's literature and criticism has been shaped by ideas about the nature, function and value of literary genres. Modern developments in critical theory, however, prompted in part by the iconoclastic practices of modern writers and the emergence of new media such as film and television, have put in question traditional categories, and challenged the assumptions on which earlier genre theory was based. This has led not just to a reinterpretation of individual genres and the development of new classifications, but also to a radically new understanding of such key topics as the mixing and evolution of genres, generic hierarchies and genre-systems, the politics and sociology of genres, and the relations between genre and gender.

This anthology, the first of its kind in English, charts these fascinating developments. Through judicious selections from major twentieth-century genre theorists including Yury Tynyanov, Vladimir Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans Robert Jauss, Rosalie Colie, Fredric Jameson, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida, it demonstrates the central role that notions of genre have played in Russian Formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism, reception theory, and various modes of historical criticism. Each essay is accompanied by a detailed headnote, and the
volume opens with a lucid introduction emphasising the international and interdisciplinary character of modern debates about genre. Also included are an annotated bibliography and a glossary of key terms, making this an indispensable resource for students and anyone interested in genre studies or literary theory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Criticism of the Theory of Artistic and Literary Kinds*

BENEDETTO CROCE

 

 

 

 

 

 

Benedetto Croce’s forthright condemnation of the doctrine of artistic and literary kinds (genres), and of other supposed ‘errors’ of aesthetic theory, inaugurated the twentieth-century debate on genre and remains a standard point of reference, if only for the extremity of its views. In this brief extract from his famous treatise on the theory and history of aesthetics, the Italian philosopher presents his reasons for abandoning the whole idea of genres, except for purely pragmatic purposes such as arranging books on shelves. Theories of genre, he claims, especially when codified into definitions and rules, impoverish artistic creation and criticism alike, inhibiting originality, setting up erroneous standards of judgement, and belying the tendency of true art to break rules and violate norms. None of these arguments is entirely new, as Croce acknowledges in a later chapter of the Aesthetic (XIX, iii) where he surveys the history of genre theory and reveals the tradition of resistance to the doctrine of kinds; and in many respects his own position is simply an extreme version of the Romantic conception of art as self-expression. But Croce gives new force to the anti-generic view by grounding it in a distinction, fundamental to his whole philosophical system, between intuitive and logical knowledge, forms of thought which he sees as independent of and irreducible to one another. Aesthetic objects belong to the former, generic categories to the latter domain; to discuss a work of art in terms of genre is thus to falsify its nature, and commit what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’. A history of genre is, likewise, an empty abstraction which Croce believes can tell us nothing about the nature of the aesthetic.

For a more recent philosophical critique of the concept of genre, see Derrida (Chapter 13). Most of the other theorists in this anthology reject Croce’s view; for a direct rebuttal, see Jauss (Chapter 8). The intellectual context of Croce’s work is discussed by René Wellek, Four Critics: Croce, Valéry, Lukács and Ingarden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), and John Paul Russo, ‘Antihistoricism in Benedetto Croce and I.A. Richards’, in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

[… ] the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory of artistic and literary kinds, which still has vogue in literary treatises and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. Let us observe its genesis.

The human mind can pass from the aesthetic to the logical, just because the former is a first step in respect to the latter. It can destroy expression, that is, the thought of the individual, by thinking of the universal. It can gather up expressive facts into logical relations. We have already shown that this operation becomes in its turn concrete in an expression, but this does not mean that the first expressions have not been destroyed. They have yielded their place to the new aesthetico-logical expressions. When we are on the second step, we have left the first.

One who enters a picture gallery, or who reads a series of poems, having looked and read, may go further: he may seek out the nature and the relations of the things there expressed. Thus those pictures and compositions, each of which is an individual inexpressible in logical terms, are gradually resolved into universals and abstractions, such as costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts; tragic, comic, pathetic, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, chivalrous, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as miniature, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, ballad, sonnet, sonnet sequence, poetry, poem, story, romance, and the like.

When we think of the concept of domestic life, or chivalry, or idyll, or cruelty, or one of the quantitative concepts mentioned above, the individual expressive fact from which we started has been abandoned. From aesthetes that we were, we have changed into logicians; from contemplators of expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a process. In what other way could science arise, which, if it have aesthetic expressions presupposed in it, must yet go beyond them in order to fulfil its function? The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the aesthetic form. He who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate aesthetically; although his thought assumes of necessity in its turn an aesthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be superfluous to repeat.

Error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept, and to find in what takes its place the laws of the thing whose place is taken; when the difference between the second and the first step has not been observed, and when, in consequence, we declare that we are standing on the first step, when we are really standing on the second. This error is known as the theory of artistic and literary kinds.

‘What is the aesthetic form of domestic life, of chivalry, of the idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be represented?’ Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of artistic and literary classes, when it has been shorn of excrescences and reduced to a simple formula. It is in this that consists all search after laws or rules of classes. Domestic life, chivalry, idyll, cruelty and the like, are not impressions, but concepts. They are not contents, but logical-aesthetic forms. You cannot express the form, for it is already itself expression. For what are the words cruelty, idyll, chivalry, domestic life, and so on, but the expression of those concepts?

Even the most refined of such distinctions, which possess the most philosophic appearance, do not resist criticism; as when works of art are divided into subjective and objective kinds, into lyric and epic, into works of feeling and decorative works. In aesthetic analysis it is impossible to separate subjective from objective, lyric from epic, the image of feeling from that of things.

From the theory of artistic and literary kinds derive those erroneous modes of judgement and of criticism, thanks to which, instead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses, whether it speak or stammer or is altogether silent, they ask if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy, of historical painting or of landscape. While making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience, artists have, however, really always disregarded these laws of the kinds. Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics, who have thus been obliged to broaden the kinds, until finally even the broadened kind has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings and – new broadenings.

To the same theory are due the prejudices, owing to which at one time (is it really passed?) people used to lament that Italy had no tragedy (until one arose who bestowed such a wreath, which alone of adornments was wanting to her glorious locks), nor France the epic poem (until the Henriade, which slaked the thirsty throats of the critics). Eulogies accorded to the inventors of new kinds are connected with these prejudices, so much so, that in the seventeenth century the invention of the mock-heroic poem seemed an important event, and the honour of it was disputed, as though it were the discovery of America. But the works adorned with this name (the Secchia rapita and the Scherno degli Dei) were still-born, because their authors (a slight drawback) had nothing new or original to say. Mediocrities racked their brains to invent new kinds artificially. The piscatorial eclogue was added to the pastoral, and finally the military eclogue. The Aminta was dipped and became the Alceo. Finally, there have been historians of art and literature, so much fascinated with these ideas of kinds, that they claimed to write the history, not of individual and real literary and artistic works, but of those empty phantoms, their kinds. They have claimed to portray, not the evolution of the artistic spirit, but the evolution of kinds.

The philosophical condemnation of artistic and literary kinds is found in the formulation and demonstration of what artistic activity has always done and good taste always recognized. What are we to do if good taste and the real fact, when reduced to formulas, sometimes assume the air of paradoxes?

It is not scientifically incorrect to talk of tragedies, comedies, dramas, romances, pictures of everyday life, battle-pieces, landscapes, seascapes, poems, versicles, lyrics, and the like, if it be only with a view to be understood, and to draw attention to certain groups of works, in general and approximately, to which, for one reason or another, it is desired to draw attention. To employ words and phrases is not to establish laws and definitions. The mistake only arises when the weight of a scientific definition is given to a word, when we ingenuously let ourselves be caught in the meshes of that phraseology. Pray permit me a comparison. The books in a library must be arranged in one way or another. This used generally to be done by a rough classification of subjects (among which the categories of miscellaneous and eccentric were not wanting); they are now generally arranged by sizes or by publishers. Who can deny the necessity and the utility of such arrangements? But what should we say if someone began seriously to seek out the literary laws of miscellanies and of eccentricities, of the Aldines or Bodonis, of shelf A or shelf B, that is to say, of those altogether arbitrary groupings whose sole object was their practical utility? Yet should any one attempt such an undertaking, he would be doing neither more nor less than those do who seek out the aesthetic laws which must in their belief control literary and artistic kinds.

 

* Reprinted from Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie, 2nd edn (London: Peter Owen, 1953), pp. 35–8. First published as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguitica generale: teoria e storia (Bari, 1902).

2 The Literary Fact*

YURY TYNYANOV

Translated into English here for the first time, this seminal essay by Yury Tynyanov demonstrates the subtlety and depth of Russian Formalist thinking on the question of genre. Where earlier Formalist theory had concentrated on poetic language and adopted a synchronic perspective in order to analyse the notion of ‘literariness’, Tynyanov here explores the historical dimension of literature, focusing on the phenomenon of literary change. Historical considerations, he argues, severely complicate the quest for literariness, since what is deemed literary (a ‘literary fact’ as distinct from a fact of everyday life) is constantly shifting, not least because genres themselves perpetually evolve – through their own internal development, but also by competing with and modifying one another, and hence moving up or down the hierarchy of genres. The essay examines how and why these evolutionary processes occur, and in so doing reflects on the methodological problems of studying an object in continuous transition. Central to the discussion is the concept of ‘system’, a metaphor Tynyanov variously applies to the individual work, the individual genre, and literature as a whole, each of which he stresses is a dynamic rather than a static system, constituted not by the peaceful interaction of different elements, but by the supremacy or foregrounding of one element that subjugates and colours the rest (an extension of the Formalist concept of the ‘dominant’, previously applied to poetic language). One important methodological implication is that genres cannot be studied in isolation, only in relation to one another – a conclusion reinforced by Colie’s work on Renaissance genre-systems (Chapter 9)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Key Concepts
• Introduction
• 1 Benedetto Croce Criticism of the Theory of Artistic and Literary Kinds
• 2 Yury Tynyanov The Literary Fact
• 3 Vladimir Propp Fairy Tale Transformations
• 4 Mikhail Bakhtin Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel
• 5 Mikhail Bakhtin The Problem of Speech Genres
• 6 Northrop Frye The Mythos of Summer: Romance
• 7 Ireneusz Opacki Royal Genres
• 8 Hans Robert Jauss Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature
• 9 Rosalie Colie Genre-Systems and the Functions of Literature
• 10 Fredric Jameson Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism
• 11 Tzvetan Todorov The Origin of Genres
• 12 Gérard Genette The Architext
• 13 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
• 14 Alastair Fowler Transformations of Genre
• 15 Mary Eagleton Genre and Gender
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index